Putting Two and Poo Together
The party, Quartle, townspeople, Tounac and his grootslang companion splash into the waterways of the Great Cistern. There is only a moment to recover before a wall of rushing water barrels through the tunnel, the current carrying everyone quickly downstream. When the current settles enough to maneuver, Connor and Quartle try to climb up onto the side walkway of the sewer, but are met with Tounac, leaning against the sewer wall. The grootslang flails wildly, unable to swim, and Grub turns into a dolphin to try to pull the townspeople to safety. Tounac uses the magic of his shrunken head fetishes in an attempt to paralyze the party, but Connor shrugs it off long enough to summon a swarm of rats to delay the lizard king. Connor, Quartle, Bundly and some of the townspeople begin to run down the sewer while Grub and the guard from the outpost try to hold off Tounac. Grub gets a few good hits in, but narrowly avoids falling to Tounac’s shamanistic magics, firing spikes of bone from the rat carcasses at his feet. Grievously wounded, Tounac creates a wall of bone between the two and escapes. Quartle is able to heal some of the groups wounds and purify some of the water to ease their passage. They head towards the center of the cistern, where Guulreesh should be waiting. They see sewer grates in the ceiling that seem to lead to a variety of different locations throughout the realms, but seemingly randomly. They could escape the sewers through one of these grates, but they don’t know where they’d end up. As they round a corner, they hear something fall with a clatter and a small shout from one of the grates behind them. A small, furry humanoid wearing a red cape is scrambling to collect all the items that scattered out of her bindle when she fell. Connor helps her recollect her items and the creature introduces herself as Ing, a travelling merchant who uses the sewers to move from place to place looking for wares and suckers- er, customers, to unload them on. Her items all appear broken, damaged and junky, but Connor detects a faint magic in the air. Connor buys a pocketwatch with a cracked glass face and broken spring, that Ing says will be the exact thing she needs “twice in a lifetime”, as well as a rusty key that will supposedly lock any keyhole. Grub fancies a set of collapsible knife and fork with a busted latch that Ing ensures her is a deadly weapon: the knife and fork will poison anybody who eats a meal with it. Ing cuts the conversation short, saying she doesn’t want to stay uninvited in Guulreesh’ domain for longer than necessary, and the party moves on. They passageway eventually opens into a large natural cavern, covered in a thick layer of a sticky slime, with great stalagmites of a semi translucent ooze rising from the ground. As the passage narrows, Quartle bounces off an apparent invisible wall, and the wall shimmers and undulates. A gelatinous cube blocks their path. With some experimentation they discover it doesn’t seem particularly interested in their fleshy bits, but is more attracted to the equipment and items they carry. They use a trail of coins and shoes to bait the ooze out of the hallway and pass by to the cavern beyond. Here, the slime is thicker and the stalagmites even larger. A statue made of slime rises aboves them, depicting a gloopy ooze wearing a crown. A dead rat, long suffocated, is suspended in the slime king’s form. As they examine the statue, they hear the squishing sound of approaching oozes, and find they are quite surrounded. Grub calls on the power of filth to raise a mighty tidal wave of sewer water to wash away the oozes, but loses control: she and quartle are washed away and Grub crashes into the center of the ooze statue, which eats away at her skin, stripping away her natural armor. Finally, the party makes it to the center of the great cistern and are greeted by Guulreesh, who bids them explain why they trespass on his domain, in particular Quartle. They explain the situation and a deal is struck: Guulreesh agrees to guide the party out of the sewer, and to assist them against Siv when the time comes. He asks for two things in return. There is an island nation, Papatanoui, that has managed to evade his grasp. They thrive and grow explosively, in defiance of Guulreesh’s grand plans. Guulreesh bid the party deliver to a virus to the island to restore the cycle of life and death. Grub becomes the carrier for this disease. His second request is simple: once Siv is defeated, Grub must return to Guulreesh, complete her metamorphosis and become a creature fit to exact his will. Guulreesh guides the party through the sewers. The townspeople are sent to a safe place in Carrick Mor, while the party emerges back into the real world in the catacombs below the castle of Carrick Mor, bypassing many of the cities defenses and getting them closer to the supposed prison where Gharrah, the last dragon is kept.